So I was 17 (see 'the eye of the beholder' 10th November blog post) when this young French man showed me page by page through a book of photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson. I loved them. And I was learning. 'What about this one?' he said. He waited while I looked and found nothing to say. Then his finger traced the line of the priest's cassock, then the line of the church roof. I was excited at having been given this key - visual assonance; part of the grammar of composition. An understanding that a photograph is not its subject alone.

Cartier-Bresson: "To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression."

For me the 'significance'*, if there is any, comes afterwards. In fact I am not sure that in the fraction of a second (or even any longer period) I can ever understand the significance of anything. Certainty is foreign territory to me, and meaning somewhat of a moveable feast**. I work from feeling, impulse. One could almost say blind impulse. Some shots I have taken against detail-cancelling glare, or while not wearing my glasses. Cartier-Bresson also said: "There is a creative fraction of a second...your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.' and I can relate to this better. My 'eye' (by which I mean not exactly the same thing as my physical eye) sees things in the moment which my brain misses completely. This is one of the things Malcolm Gladwell speaks about in 'Blink'.

So , the 'indecisive moment' (not to make H C-B wrong, just to play with language how it better works for me)... I have stood waiting for the wind to stop so I can capture the leaf, the blossom. I have stood in front of the abandoned shop window, waiting for a clear shot, allowing a walker to go by and then cursing myself for having missed the V of his scissoring legs, the assonance that I was sent and failed to record (H C-B "Once you miss it, it is gone forever.") So I have learned a benign attitude to the inconvenience, a benign attitude to doubt. Always still re-appreciating a blind trust in instinct.

'I am not sure this is going to work.' Snap.

* Of course, I am not often shooting in a content-rich environment with an argument to make - like someone visit an orphanage or a war zone. Hm, perhaps I am seeking to find content in a content-less environment. Footpath detritus. Looking for soul in the soul-less urban landscape. Testing / exercising my own belief in Lila: 'the Indic concept of the universe as a playground of the divine' (thank you Wikipedia, what a gorgeous phrase). In the chaos inside a refuse skip, in that piece of crushed tinsel, the divine.

Author

Performer and theatremaker Peta Lily has been taking photographs for the last five years. Her aesthetic has been to use her iPhone camera to capture the world close up and with an immediacy that is both surprising and moving.